The loss of the Energon Monsters probably explains why wave 1's clear plastic weapons gimmick disappeared. Legacy seems to have had a chaotic development.
I don't hate Skullgrin's tank mode but it is a strange downgrade from what they originally had in mind. I don't get what happened.
Bombburst looks like a home run though. I haven't cared for the modern Pretender approach but they've finally convinced me. I guess it's because they finally convincingly made a shell based robot mode look like a totally separate thing from the vehicle mode. They didn't just slap a monster head on a normal robot, nor did they invent a new vehicle mode to match the look of the shell. They made the shell and the inner vehicle mode morph back and forth between each other.
Legacy does seem to have been weirdly disjointed.
For all its flaws in execution, WFC was presented from the beginning
as a trilogy, with a clear mission statement and even a basic plot arc. IDK if that got shaken up a bit by the pandemic, as I don't recall whether the BW pivot was
always planned as
such a core part of part 3. The last two years are mush in my mush brain. Regardless, from the get-go, there was "[x aesthetic] plus Micros plus Weaponizer style components", which remained consistent through the three lines (albeit with Kingdom shifting to Core class).
From the first announcements of it, What Follows WFC lacked any of this cohesion. No Trilogy IIRC, just one line at a time for now, not sure about longer-term structure. Even little things like item numbering are gone. (I'd dismissed that as collector-pandering Takara imitation, but it does add some consistency and cohesion to lines and I'd gotten used to it just in time to suddenly lose it.) And we're seeing things like vestiges of these Energon Monsters (we hardly knew ye, you sounded cool) and these phased-out Energon weapons (which I'm fine with if especially if it means we can get opaque cassette bots down the line). Maybe there was some similarly canned stuff from WFC that just didn't get leaked or whatever. Micros did get phased out but that seems to have been a retailer thing (grrr).
Legacy's very premise lends itself to a chaotic, reshuffling-prone feel, too, as it basically doubles down on Kingdom's "let's have a mix of lines/character groups" which makes it a bit tough to get a unified sense of what's in each wave or line. Not necessarily a bad thing, mind: it's been
really cool to see Bulkhead, Override, Jhiaxus, etc revisited and in some cases revisited really well. And it's been refreshing to break away a bit from the "cross off the G1 checklist" game (although that's been good for collecting too). But rather than move forward one era at a time (say, a Kingdom-style "G1 and UT" trilogy), it's Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Maybe if there'd been SOME fiction to help tie everything together, and which would also be evidence of a stronger planning process. By comparison, WFC felt more coordinated because there was a Netflix show tied to it, and quality concerns aside, that gave the line a bit more weight. Here, not so much, although I suppose with Earthspark being a/the new media focus and with IDW's license ending and IDK what terms they're on with Netflix there aren't a lot of venues for media for this line.
Supporting fiction has been instrumental in helping "throw whatever in there" groupings feel more cohesive -- Wreckers started out that way, and for years every single Botcon/TFCC set was "here's a bunch of characters", sometimes with a unifying theme (2006) and sometimes with far less of one (uh... most years, as even ones with a supposed unifying theme like 2013 got pretty mixed up). BUT strong narratives that tied everything together helped a lot. Here, it's just "Alexa, play Portals" and you do the rest.
I wish all these Pretenders were Deluxe class, but obviously this way lets them cover more ground rather than just one a wave. Plus, the size diversity would make group shots more visually interesting. Maybe NOW I'll finally pick up an Iguanus like I've been waffling on. If they make a Finback, I am definitely all over that.
I still want my wackily-colored Wingfinger, dammit. Yall couldn't have packed him in with the Wreckers? Maybe for wave 2? Please? We've gotten so many of the other two.
